Brawn GP Pace Explanation – Brawn’s Brilliant Decision
On the cusp of failing, the “old” Honda team was saved when the manufacturer sold it to a group of investors led by Ross Brawn. Now that the car is on the testing track, it is simply blowing away the field in shocking fashion.
The first thought of most people in Formula One is Brawn GP is playing funny to attract sponsors for the car. The truth is that may very well be the case. Most people questioning the times, however, are focusing on the wrong thing. Brawn GP is not doing low fuel runs that produce fast time because there is less weight in the car. Instead, the team might be doing laps without any ballast in the cars. That being said, the times are so fast that adding ballast would still result in a very fast car at the front of the field.
Given that the car is undeniably fast, how did this come to be? The Honda F1 cars of 2007 and 2008 were bad. How bad? They were the ultimate mutts, and that’s an insult to scroungy dogs everywhere. The cars were regularly fighting it out with Super Aguri and the like at the back of the pack. Given the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by Honda, it was nothing less than a disgrace. So, how can the new car be so much better? The answer is found in a brilliant decision by Ross Brawn.
Ross Brawn was brought in at Honda just at the beginning of the 2008 season. One of the men behind the dominant Schumacher/Ferrari era, he knew a thing or two about managing a team. More importantly, he had the inherent credibility to make a tough decision and make it stick with the management back in Japan. What was that decision? We have to go back to the dogs again.
The decision facing Brawn was this – where do you start improving a flawed car like the 2008 Honda? Aerodynamics? Engine? Suspension? His answer was absolutely brilliant – you don’t! The 2008 Honda was never going to become an average, much less great, car racing for championships, so why waste any time developing it. Instead, Brawn turned the attention to the 2009 car. While the other teams spent the vast majority of their efforts on their 2008 cars, Honda spent almost all their time on the 2009 car.
Given this “head start” in development, is it any surprise the Honda/Brawn GP cars have made a huge leap forward? If this was the old Honda team, I would think it was a surprise. With Brawn on board, however, you have to think the first thing he did was get rid of the weak spots in the team.
Is the Brawn car the clear quality of the field? That’s yet to be determined. What we do know is it is going to at least be near the front of the field and that can be put down to one thing – a brilliant decision by Ross Brawn.
Lemmy